Title
ConCORDe-Net: Cell Count Regularized Convolutional Neural Network for Cell Detection in Multiplex Immunohistochemistry Images
Abstract
In digital pathology, cell detection and classification are often prerequisites to quantify cell abundance and explore tissue spatial heterogeneity. However, these tasks are particularly challenging for multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) images due to high levels of variability in staining, expression intensity, and inherent noise as a result of preprocessing artefacts. We proposed a deep learning method to detect and classify cells in mIHC whole-tumor slide images of breast cancer. Inspired by inception-v3, we developed Cell COunt RegularizeD Convolutional neural Network (ConCORDe-Net) which integrates conventional dice overlap and a new cell count loss function for optimizing cell detection, followed by a multi-stage convolutional neural network for cell classification. In total, 20447 cells, belonging to five cell classes were annotated by experts from 175 patches extracted from 6 whole-tumor mIHC images. These patches were randomly split into training, validation and testing sets. Using ConCORDe-Net, we obtained a cell detection F1 score of 0.873, which is the best score compared to three state of the art methods. In particular, ConCORDe-Net excels at detecting closely located and weakly stained cells compared to other methods. Incorporating cell count loss in the objective function regularizes the network to learn weak gradient boundaries and separate weakly stained cells from background artefacts. Moreover, cell classification accuracy of 96.5% was achieved. These results support that incorporating problem specific knowledge such as cell count into deep learning based cell detection architectures improves robustness of the algorithm.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/978-3-030-32239-7_74
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Cell detection,Convolutional neural network,Multiplex immunohistochemistry,Cell counter,Deep learning,Breast cancer
Conference
11764
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yeman Brhane Hagos100.68
Priya Narayanan211.70
Ayse U. Akarca300.34
Teresa Marafioti400.34
Yinyin Yuan5625.38